Okay, I promised I'd read The Breath of Angels this week, and I
did. Here's my opinionated opinion on the book:

First, I'd like to start off with a complaint. I think that John
Beattie has committed an unpardonable sin as part of creating this
book. In short, it is very unkind of him to have limited himself to a
single literary creation, when it is obvious that he has tremendous
talent from which the world could benefit should he only find the time
and resources to write further works (This is :-), for the
humor-impaired!).

In reality, I found the book fascinating. I haven't read many
“true-life” nautical books (only My Old Man and the Sea,
which was entertaining but not nearly as good), but I enjoyed Angels
tremendously. My wife started reading it to me after I came out of
anesthesia from an operation, and I fell asleep precisely between chapters 1
and 2 (she claims she read all of chapter 2 aloud, but I recalled nothing of it).
Chapter 1 was, all by itself, enough to hook me. When I found myself
sleepless a few hours later, I picked it up again and was soon
engrossed. I'd guess that I got through 6-10 chapters that night, and
by the time I got home, I was picking it up at every spare moment.
There are certain advantages to being an invalid: my wife would get up
to clear the dishes and I didn't have to help, so I'd stop the video
we were watching and read a few more pages of Angels in the
meantime. By the time the evening was over, I had finished the book.

Contradicting the stereotypes one might have for a professor of
mathematics, John's writing is lively and entertaining, never dry. He
is not normally a descriptive sort of person, concentrating more on
the sequence of events than on the visuals associated with them, but
every once in a while some image overcomes his natural reticence and
he bursts into gloriously vivid prose. (Perhaps a more cynical critic
than I would find these passages overdone, but for example, I enjoyed
the hell out of his description of swimming in a phosphorescent sea.)

One thing that struck me repeatedly in the early chapters was the
conviction that, although I would probably manage to avoid the
particular mistakes that John made, I would no doubt have invented ten
times as many of my own. The incidents he experienced were very
entertaining (so long as you didn't have to go through them), but
they really brought home to me just how difficult bluewater sailing
can be.

The “payoff” section, the part where he rescues the drifting
castaway, comes very late in the book and is remarkably brief. I found myself
eagerly awaiting that incident, since it's received so much discussion
on Yacht-L, and somewhat
surprised by how quickly its description passes by. At first I was
disappointed by the brevity, but I should have trusted John's storytelling
talent. While it is true that the rescue and subsequent events happen rapidly,
it is also true that when I finished the book, I felt completely satisfied by
the amount of space devoted to that part of the story. More accurately, I felt
completely satisfied by the whole thing.

Even before reading the book, I was wondering about the title. I
figured it was some sort of reference to the rescue, something such as
a suggestion that it was angels' breath that helped Martin Simon to
survive until John picked him up. I will say here only that my
assumption was wrong. The title is explained in the course of the
book, and is an excellent one. However, the explanation is brief,
almost tossed off in passing, so don't stop paying attention or you'll
miss it (and it's worth understanding).

In summary, this is a cracking good book. I recommend that you plan
to read it. However, I should warn everyone to allocate an interrupted
timeslot for the task, because the book has a tendency to grab you and refuse
to let go.